Always better to let your feet do the talking
It can seem sometimes that we have been debating the viability or otherwise of Robbie Keane forever. Notwithstanding the small matter of a general election — and, by the way, I’d like to announce here that, when the circumstances are more propitious, I plan to lead some like-minded media folk in a radical new movement called ‘Democracy Later’ — it seems like a large chunk of the national conversation in recent weeks has been dominated by the subject of Ireland’s captain and record striker, and whether or not he should be regarded as arrogant, greedy, lazy, at a crossroads, in limbo, on the slippery slope, nearing the end or his own worst enemy.
Then just 37 minutes into his West Ham debut at Bloomfield Road, he seizes on a loose ball in the box and — boom! — it’s in the back of the net. Debate over — or, at least, the terms are suddenly changed to what might yet be in store from Robbie Keane as opposed to whether he has any future at all.
A pity then, that before he put his foot through it, he’d put his foot in it, his apparently dismissive reply to a question about his Irish future causing another little flurry of bad publicity.
Asked at his inaugural Upton Park press conference about Giovanni Trapattoni’s concerns about the player’s club situation, Keane replied as if he’d just stepped in something unpleasant.
“I have not really worried or thought about my position with the Ireland team,” he snapped back. “It is all about now and I’ve said before if I didn’t play for Ireland and someone else came in, I have always said I would walk away.”
Paper never refuses ink and, within 12 hours, an apparently throwaway remark was being headlined as a ‘Robbie Quits’ threat on the more excitable back pages, his narky response at a press conference transformed into a pick-me-or-I’m-off ultimatum supposedly directed at Trap.
And, indeed, that would have been a very big story indeed, were it not for the inescapable sense that Keane’s words were generated in the heat of the moment and that — his evident annoyance at being asked the question notwithstanding — a more acceptable expression of the intended sentiment would have gone something along the lines of, “I’ve always been very proud to play for Ireland but, of course, when the time comes and someone comes along who can do the job better than me, I’ll gracefully leave the stage.”
But even though we all know that Irish players don’t come much more committed than Keane, that is not the way he chose to answer a perfectly legitimate question and the result was a mini-own goal which, on past experience, he is more likely to blame on the pesky meeja than his own lack of thoughtful eloquence.
We might find out more on Monday in Dublin when, as Irish skipper, he will be expected to accompany Trapattoni at the eve of match press conference for the Carling Nations’ Cup game against Wales. However, few will complain if Robbie Keane, as he did at Bloomfield Road, leaves it to his feet to do the most meaningful talking at the Aviva Stadium on Tuesday night. After all, the rest is just window dressing.
In the changed, not to say charged, landscape of the post-transfer window Premiership, the same applies to Fernando Torres.
Yesterday, the former Anfield icon sought to heal wounds ahead of tomorrow’s meeting between his new and old clubs by saying that he has too much respect for the Liverpool supporters to celebrate a goal should he score one on his debut at Stamford Bridge.
However, these are words unlikely to placate the travelling Kop who won’t forget in a hurry that the Spaniard’s parting shot before heading south had included the ringing declaration: “The target for every player is to play for one of the tops clubs in the world and I can do it now, so I’m very happy.”
There has been a lot of revisionism in the wake of Torres’ sensational £50million move, not least the popular suggestion that he is a player in decline.
How quickly long-suffering Liverpool fans seem to have forgotten that, for a full season and a half and, indeed, right up until just a few weeks ago, they were all unanimous in bemoaning the plight of the club and, Torres and Steven Gerrard aside, the lack of players on the pitch of anything even vaguely resembling the quality traditionally associated with the famous all-red strip.
Now, suddenly, we’re supposed to believe that Torres himself was one of the architects of the mess rather than, as I would believe, one of the victims of it.
Yes, there have to be concerns about the regularity with which he seems to succumb to injury but I think Merseysiders need to be devoting much more of their time to the unhappy fact that their putative saviour Andy Carroll is worryingly prone to setbacks of an altogether more self-inflicted kind.
In advance of tomorrow’s big game, I’m convinced that Chelsea got much the better of the deal.
But we’ll only begin to know for sure when we see what Fernando Torres in a blue shirt can do with the ball at his feet. As Robbie Keane knows, opening shots can ring so much louder than parting shots.
